Welcome back to The Wall! We’ve scoured the release list and boiled it down, as always, to the absolute must-buys of the week. Yeah, there are more titles that are dropping, but NOTHING this week is as cool as the titles we have listed. Dig the goods, Bastards.

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— DG PICK OF THE WEEK–

Good news for all of you Pete Walker fans. One of the kings of sleaze and tease is all boxed up. While the clear standouts are HOUSE OF WHIPCORD represents some of his best work, the others in this collection are fun as hell. Walker never had a film that I would consider a home-run, they all have their problems, but he was largely ignored and tossed aside by critics and he certainly deserved more.

ALSO OUT THIS WEEK…

Man, it seems awfully early in his career to be putting together a set like this. Especially since two of his classics (PULP FICTION and JACKIE BROWN) just recently made their way to Blu-ray. 5 hours of extras isn’t enough to get me to drop some bank, but if KILL BILL: THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR was part of the deal, I would hump to the leg of Lionsgate for the next year. A close second would be a new transfer of RESERVOIR DOGS. Currently, the best release of that film was the last DVD release.

I really wanted to like this movie. I wasn’t a huge fan of the first one but when the cast started to come together for the sequel and Simon West was on board to direct I had visions of slow-motion badassery in my head. Unfortunately, what I got was a shit-load of bad acting, lame action, and a bad case of “I’m still relevant.” There is talk about a third, something with Nic Cage maybe, but I could give a hump.

A visionary critique of American expansionism, Heaven’s Gate, directed by Oscar winner Michael Cimino, is among Hollywood’s most ambitious and unorthodox epics. Kris Kristofferson is a Harvard graduate who has relocated all the way to Wyoming as a federal marshal; there, he learns of a government-sanctioned plot by rich cattle barons to kill the area’s European settlers for their land. The resulting skirmish is based on the real-life bloody Johnson County War of 1892. Also starring Isabelle Huppert and Christopher Walken, Heaven’s Gate is a savage and ravishingly shot demystification of western movie lore. This is the full director’s cut, letting viewers today see Cimino’s potent original vision.

None of these films are game changers the way GODZILLA was, but they each have their importance in the genre. Glad to see these getting the treatment they deserve. What a great year for Criterion and monsters.

I haven’t seen this yet but I want to preemptively thank Takao Nakano and Sola Aoi for making this film possible. God breast them, God breast them all.

Martin Campbell’s THE MASK OF ZORRO (1998) is the best version of Zorro I have seen (having said that, I have always been an Errol Flynn/Robin Hood kind of guy), but if you’re even remotely a fan of the original black mask, you should check this flick out. There are moments when the film just grinds to a halt but stick with it, there is a huge payoff at the end courtesy of well-staged sword fight.

HARD CORE LOGO is one of the greatest films to come out of Canada and one of the best films about punk music that you could find. The sequel is ready to give you a smile and a slap, and I can’t wait to get eyeballs on it. Dig it!

The bad: I somehow have never seen this flick.

The good: I just remedied that and should have this at DG HQ in a matter of days.

I just sent this over to Sweetback so keep an eye out for this in a future No-Budget Nightmares.

We’ll be back next week with: PARANORMAN, LAWLESS, MEN IN BLACK III, and more.